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March 13, 2010

R&J Turns 50

I call this: On the Road Again,theatre — Posted by KP @ 1:57 am

Yesterday we celebrated our 50th performance of R&J. This was our official 50th performance, not counting three previews and an invited dress.

As our run is something like 80-ish performances (we keep canceling and adding and it’s driving me crazy as the database is currently built to have performance numbers manually associated with dates — that is changing!) But as we are only doing 80-something performances, 50 is really the only milestone we hit.

The last time I had to deal with something like this was a few months ago, right before I left to start rehearsals, when I was asked if a curtain speech should say “9,000 performances” or “performance number 9,000.” (I said “performance number 9,000,” which I later read in the press is what was said.)

Anyway, milestones and anniversaries have been a common occurrence in my career, so I tend to see them and plan to celebrate them out of habit.

Last year we were doing a sit-down in Phoenix when we hit #50, and I had a little sign on the callboard saying “Happy 50th” and that was about it.

This year as I saw the numbers creeping up from 40, I counted ahead and at the start of the week said, “Our 50th is going to be in Hartford [Wisconsin], we should get a little something for the cast.”

I didn’t do the best job at remembering to pick stuff up on the one occasion I was in a store, but I did get some little candies, and it so happens the venue’s hospitality had a nice candy jar, so I combined them to make a cornucopia of candy, under my sign that I had prepared during some downtime earlier in the week.

I also took a page from Phantom‘s publicists, who are fond of including fun facts (usually spelled phun phacts) along with anniversary press releases (like “Phantom has used 43,520 pounds of dry ice” and stuff like that.) So since my sign was looking a little empty, I decided to compile a few facts that would still be interesting even with only 50 performances to work with. Since I was planning this a few days in advance, I threw together a layout in the database that would keep some of these stats updated so I didn’t have to do any math on the day of the event.

  • Total time in performance to date: 129 hours, 37 minutes and 30 seconds
  • Seen by 26,762 people!
  • “Banished” spoken 1,431 times!
  • Someone called “Ho” 530 times!
  • Animal life encountered [backstage or onstage]: bat, bird, mouse, beetles

Everybody seemed very happy with the candy, and intrigued by our fun facts (which are calculated up to the performance before the 50th, and include previews and the invited dress).


March 12, 2010

Dear Civilization: Please Help. Crew Starving. Send Interwebs.

I call this: On the Road Again,phones,theatre — Posted by KP @ 7:54 pm

Here I sit, at the Fairfield Inn in Ottumwa, IA. Clinging to a single bar of Edge on my iPhone.

I know what you’re thinking: “why are you even looking at your phone and expecting it to work? — you’re in Iowa. AT&T has made it clear they don’t care about Iowa. You should be happy you have any signal at all.”

Well, about that. The Fairfield Inn is charging us $90 a night. What in Ottumwa is worth that much for a hotel room? I have no idea.  It must be something or else they’d be out of business.  All I know is it’s half a mile to the closest source of food, and this afternoon we had to have our bus driver drive us to the grocery store, and tonight he’s taking us downtown for dinner.  The bus driver, by the way, is not really supposed to have to do that.  His job is to drive us between cities, to the hotel, and to the venue.  Otherwise he should be sleeping, or picking up chicks, or whatever else bus drivers do when they’re off the clock.  Any other trips beyond that are just to be nice.

The bus internet, which uses Sprint, is struggling a bit here, too, which is surprising because it always does better than AT&T in places of dubious importance to wireless carriers.

No problem though. We have two days off here. We have hotel rooms. We can just sit in the hotel and use the internet all we want. WRONG.

THE HOTEL INTERNET IS BROKEN.

They don’t know when it will be fixed.

Let me recap what we’re getting for $90/night at the Fairfield Inn in Ottumwa, IA:

  • No access to food aside from the snack machine in the hall (I don’t know if it works)
  • Located in the middle of nowhere where both AT&T and Sprint don’t provide reliable service
  • NO INTERNET

Look at this smug little anthropomorphized ethernet jack. Lies. All lies. Now, a hotel advertising “high speed internet” almost always means that one time, about 10 years ago, their bandwidth would have been considered high speed. When I installed my first 56K modem I felt like I had put a rocketship in my computer too, so I get where they’re coming from. But seeing the little sticker on the wall when I checked in did not fill me with hope. I did kind of expect that there would be something coming out of it, though.

We’ve complained, but the manager won’t be in until tomorrow, so who knows how it will turn out. I wouldn’t mind paying half the price for a place to shower, sleep and do laundry, but we’ve stayed in nice hotels in the downtown areas of major cities for less, and they had internet, too.

If we were just passing through it would be one thing, but this is where we’re spending two days off. The cast, lucky sons-of-guns, are staying an extra day in our previous hotel, which was near a lot of stuff, including a fast food / ice cream joint called Culver’s, which I’d never heard of, but about which I will be fantasizing for months if not years.

I think I may be doing a lot of writing for these days, although usually when I write I do refer to the internet for things. I will get by with whatever I can eke out of my one bar of Edge. I can only imagine what a disaster my life would be right now if my phone wasn’t jailbroken and I couldn’t tether. You hear me, AT&T? I’m stealing the bandwidth I already paid you for — 1KB every second!

UPDATE

Well things worked out OK. An hour before we were supposed to check out, Bobby called to say that the hotel was going to take care of us and let us stay all night (we have a 4AM load-in, so we were going to check out at 1PM and then sit on the bus in the middle of nowhere until our 3:30AM departure). And on top of that, they just fixed the internet! So the ability to stay all day, time to grab some sleep before load-in, even shower again if we want to, and the access to internet while here, have made it worth the $90 (I consider that a day-and-a-half hotel stay, which works out to just about what the room is worth).

I had just settled in to spend my last hour in the hotel beginning to prepare graphic elements for the next version of my stage management database, which I will begin working on once the tour is over. I figured it’s the one project I can accomplish completely offline. I want it to share the look and feel of the website, so I began importing the graphics. Here’s what I came up with in the five minutes before the phone rang.

And this whole experience allowed me to return to my childhood, when you could click a web link, go take a shower, and come back to see if the page had finished loading.

In other news, their internet seemed really fast, maybe fast enough for gaming, which is what I usually hope to do when staying in a hotel for a day off, so I headed over to DSL Reports to see what the speeds were. One time it tested at about 100kpbs, and another in excess of 1MB. Anyway, I’m happy with whatever it is.


Hartford, WI

I call this: On the Road Again,theatre — Posted by KP @ 2:33 am

After our Adventure in Brainerd, we moved on to Hartford, WI, where we enjoyed hotel rooms and a day off.

Today we are enjoying a one-nighter, in a cute little theatre known as the Schaeur Arts and Activities Center. We are as close to the edge of the stage as the marley has ever been, which prompted an 8:05AM email to Corey and our fight captain Chris, but Chris determined all would be well.

Again we had a drivable genie. This one has a large platform that can hold more than one person. Again Devon focused himself, and greatly enjoyed scooting around the stage. At the end of focus, we were doing our very last onstage light, and Devon brought the lift down, drove it to centerstage, and then realized he forgot to put the gel back in the light. Making a happy occasion out of it, he offered me a ride in the lift, and let me drive it back to position for him to drop the color, and then back to centerstage. It was really fun.

The show looked fantastic, and the theatre with its bare-wood columns (it used to be some kind of factory — a cannery, I heard) and its wrap-around balcony actually suggested something like Shakespeare’s Globe. I didn’t get a great picture of it, but I did snap this one during load-out.


March 11, 2010

Cedar Falls, IA and Our Adventure in Brainerd, MN

I call this: On the Road Again,theatre — Posted by KP @ 7:10 pm

I’m a little behind. Here’s a wrap-up of our last two venues from earlier this week.

Cedar Falls

I barely remember Cedar Falls, which is weird because we were only there three or four days ago. What I do remember was our hotel, a Holiday Inn with an indoor atrium containing a pool and an arcade. The day we arrived there was some kind of convention. I think it was the Society for the Promotion of Screaming Running Children and Drunken Parents, but I might be mistaken. Anyway, the rooms had full-wall windows facing directly onto the atrium (mine formed one wall of the arcade) which didn’t quite get completely covered by the curtains, and the beds were closest to the window. So it was very noisy and a bit concerning to one’s privacy.

In comparison to the hotel, the venue (at the University of Northern Iowa) was a breeze. It was a very large theatre (1,600 seats) with the most amazing acoustics we’ve ever encountered. A little too amazing at times, as from my calling position in the down-left corner, I had to be really quiet because my calls could be heard onstage. It was a really beautiful and convenient space. The most unusual thing about it was that for our student matinee they had a big projection screen that flew in, on which they projected excerpts from the show and R&J trivia while the kids filed in and waited for the show to start.

Brainerd, MN

TRIVIA: Brainerd is one of the settings of the movie Fargo (it’s where most of the murders take place, and where the infamous woodchipper scene happens). This was one of those venues where we saw nothing outside the parking lot of the venue, so I don’t have any fun stories about that.

This one was an adventure, but one with a happy ending. When we arrived at 8AM for our load-in, there was no crew. By maybe 8:15 or 8:30 we had found somebody to let us in, and we had one crew member, Josh. Josh, while a big strong guy, was not quite capable of replacing the 15 people our tech rider requires. Without knowing what we were dealing with, we couldn’t even begin to start loading in. Some people were assembled from every corner of the college, but we didn’t have many (any?) people who could work the whole day — most could only work for an hour or two at a time between classes and other things. After some phone calls to the office, we determined that we would do the show somehow, though we definitely wouldn’t have time to attempt to put up the whole set.

Last year, you may recall, we performed Henry V twice without the set. On those occasions we did it on purpose, in venues that were simply too small to fit it. We also knew in advance that we would have to do the show that way, and weeks of planning went into it. It also required about five hours of rehearsal. Eleven hours before the show, we had no plan for how to do R&J on a bare stage, aside from our one-hour version, which could be adapted into the full version, but not without much rehearsal.

I’m going to talk at length about our decision-making process, because while I hope it’s a decision nobody else ever has to make, things do happen on the road and one of the most difficult and most important things about touring is being faced with a situation that looks impossible at first glance, and figuring out how to put on the best show possible.

At first we were kind of stumped. We sat on the bus and tried to brainstorm. The fact that it was 8AM probably didn’t help our minds to work any faster. We had several options immediately, none of which we really liked:

  • we could do the regular show on a bare stage, which would require a very long, probably painful rehearsal
  • we had the one-hour show ready to go, but people have paid to see the whole show, and it seemed like a cop-out
  • we could do the full show with costumes, but using the one-hour staging, but there are some significant differences between the two shows, which would have to be carefully worked out

One thing that we kept hitting upon was that the show can stand well on its own, but the one thing that Romeo and Juliet really requires, that audiences expect to see, is a balcony. Somehow we had to create a balcony, even if it was low to the ground. Jason, our wardrobe supervisor, I think had the idea of using one of our balcony pieces on its travel wheels (the balcony and the stair landing each have four giant casters with brakes that slide into the bottom corners so they can be wheeled for travel). That was the best idea we had so far.

In order to know what we had to work with, here’s a picture of our set as it normally is:

The staff was just arriving at the New York office (at 9AM their time) when we began our ordeal, but once we were able to fill them in on what was happening we began working amongst ourselves to decide what exactly to do. The first step was to call Corey, who is the staff director, and responsible for the artistic decisions on the road. I filled him in on the very quick-and-dirty version of what was going on — that we couldn’t put up the whole set and we had to decide what we could do, and it would probably involve a lengthy emergency rehearsal. Corey immediately began arranging for a cab to get to the theatre.

While he was en route, the rest of us continued racking our brains for a good solution. Bobby continued assessing how much we might be able to accomplish, as more workers showed up. We played off the idea of using the balcony landing on its wheels as the only real set element, but Bobby offered to put up the whole balcony.

“You could do the walls, and the platforms and the escape stairs?” I asked.

Yes.

Now we had something that was functional. Somebody else, maybe Olivia, chimed in, “that would also give us the hobbit hole.” The hobbit hole is the tiny door under the stairs, that’s part of the same wall set that the balcony door is in. Having both the balcony entrance and the hobbit hole would give us most of the distinct areas that exist in the show and help to distinguish the setting for each scene.

With the two farthest stage-left walls in place, the only other entrance we needed was the up-right door, which ideally requires access from upstage center. There was some miscellaneous masking hung, and I concocted a scheme whereby we took one of the curtains and essentially used it to form the rest of the wall between the balcony and the stage-left side of the up-right door, thus giving us an entrance that was identical in function, although it would not be enclosed on the stage-right side. Upstage of it would be a black traveler, which would mask the escape stairs. Because the “wall” curtain wasn’t angled like the set is, the offstage space was a little narrower, but the lack of physical walls upstage actually gave us more space because the area under the escape stairs was open for prop storage, quickchanges and passage by actors and crew.

As we were finalizing this plan, Corey arrived. We proposed our solution, and he agreed it seemed like a very good idea. My favorite part of it was that it didn’t change the blocking at all. Once the actors were introduced to the concept of “this curtain = this wall,” they could go about their business as usual. Corey and I agreed no rehearsal was necessary, and by the time he left had scaled back our estimate of bringing the cast in an hour early, to 15 minutes early. If all went well with the installation, it literally changed nothing.

The set construction went well, as did lighting focus, thanks to the cool drivable Genie they had, which Devon drove around like a kid in a Toys R Us commercial. The main problems we had to solve involved the fact that the proscenium is only 13′ high, and the drops are correspondingly short. Our set is 18′ high, which creates a problem: the drops don’t reach the floor before the pipe hits the set. By like, a lot. Like three feet. So we took some spare legs and pinned them to the bottom of the legs that were there, to extend the length of the downstage “wall” masking, and used some black fabric we bought for the New York run to do the same for the upstage traveler. It wasn’t as pretty as if they had been a single piece of fabric, but under stage lights they looked pretty nice.

We had one gap up-right where the side masking didn’t quite meet up with the upstage traveler, but it was better than some venues we’ve played. Unfortunately that was the side the dressing rooms were on, so cast, crew and dressers were going to be crossing through the gap all the time. We were brainstorming how we could build a flat out of our unused pieces when the venue staff offered to paint one of their stock flats black for us. Problem solved! They also built a very nice railing for us for the downstage side of our escape stairs, which normally don’t need a railing because there’s a wall. I was determined that we had to have some kind of makeshift railing at least on the upper half of the stairs, even if it was made out of spare pipes and cheeseboroughs, but what we got was much more sturdy and appropriate than I had hoped for.

In the late afternoon, when the set and masking were finished, I took this picture and sent it to the cast and Corey, with a basic explanation of how it worked, so they could begin to get used to the idea.

When the cast arrived they were great sports about it. Ray (Friar Laurence) saw that “his” side of the stage, including his favorite offstage chair upstage of the hobbit hole, were completely intact, and decided that as long as that was the case, all was well!

Christine (Lady Capulet), however, is a little more attached to the stage right wall of the set, which often represents the Capulet house, and lamented that somebody had burned her poor house down!

It took very little explanation for them to get used to the idea of the set, and nobody had any concerns to raise about things that wouldn’t be possible with it. Every time we arrive at a venue we do a walkaround right before fight call, where we quickly sketch out the parameters of how the show functions in the venue: which wings are dead, which have hazards like floor-mounted lights or cables, we confirm which wing Tybalt’s body goes off into, and where Fred the Platform (we have recently learned his Equity name is Frederick von Bedthoven) lives offstage. The boundaries of all the pieces of the set are drawn in paint pen on the marley, so I pointed out to the cast that they could look down and see these marks if it helped them with spacing. The process took a few minutes longer, but the cast is used to having to adapt somewhat for every space, and there are alternate plans in place for a lot of things, that we already have a shorthand for (i.e. “we’re using Guthrie masking,” “Fred is onstage similar to the Baruch position”).

And here’s a picture of the set under lights:

The happy ending to the story was that not only was the 284-seat theatre sold out, but they were turning people away at the doors, and crammed every last person they could into every empty seat that was unclaimed at curtain time. When that kind of thing happens, the lucky ticketholders see the commotion at the box office and tend to get really excited about the show they’re about to see. They really enjoyed the show, and were a more vocal audience than we’ve had lately. At intermission I was told that about 80% of the audience had never seen Shakespeare performed before, which was amazing to me given that they were following the show so well. At the end of the show we got a full standing ovation, which has only happened once before. So we left having had a great time, and clearly still were able to educate and entertain our audience.


March 10, 2010

“The Two Hours’ Traffic of Our Stage” and Other Dirty Filthy Lies

I call this: On the Road Again,theatre — Posted by KP @ 4:40 pm

Shakespeare, in general, is known (among his other accomplishments) as a writer of long plays. If you’re going to see Shakespeare you know it’s not a 90 minute / no intermission deal. That being said, Romeo and Juliet is not particularly known as being one of his longer plays. It says right there in the prologue:

“[really long run-on sentence about dead lovers]
Is now the two hours’ traffic of our stage.”

I’m not much of a scholar of Elizabethan theatre, but I think this has perplexed people for some time, since we as modern theatre artists can’t seem to stage Shakespeare’s work without cutting it heavily or making it four hours long.

I spoke with a gentleman at a recent venue who was lamenting that we had made some cuts. Now some of our changes have to do with adapting to the size and gender makeup of our cast, but we have definitely made a lot of cuts for time. I explained all this, and he was still sad that we had felt the need to cut it for time. Our show is already three hours long. I refrained from starting and ending my argument by saying “BECAUSE IT WOULD BE FOUR HOURS LONG!!!”

I’m sure there are people who would love to pay to see a four- or five-hour unabridged (which is a tricky word with all the various folios and quartos) production of a Shakespeare play (hell, I might if I didn’t have to see it every day — or twice a day — can you imagine?), but there are overtime fees for actors and stagehands, there are time schedules to be kept between the end of one performance and the time it takes to drive to the next venue by 8AM, and the school groups have to go to class at some point in their day. Most people we encounter are shocked the show is as long as it is.

Anyway, a friend recently recommended I read Shakespeare by Bill Bryson, which debunks a lot of the myths about Shakespeare and lists the very few facts we actually know for sure about him. One of the things he talks about is the possibility that the printed versions of the plays might have contained additional text that was never performed, or perhaps never meant to be performed. So sort of like when they include deleted scenes on a DVD, or a bonus track on an album. It’s an interesting concept.

In my own mind I’ve always wondered if the acting style was much less naturalistic and they all just talked faster. I can see where, with different choices, an hour could be cut out of a show. If I had a time machine, the first place I would go would be to see a premiere of one of Shakespeare’s works, mostly out of curiosity to see if I’m right, and to see how much else we’ve gotten wrong in our assumptions about how his plays were performed.

But the idea that some of the scenes were kind of background material that audiences never saw live was rather shocking to me. It also goes against something that’s said a lot (and comes up frequently in our talkbacks), that Shakespeare’s plays were meant to be performed, not to be read. The only people who published them (we think) were unauthorized publishers during his life, and some of his collaborators who compiled the folios after his death.

Of course if I did a show, and years later the writer was hailed as a genius with almost a religious fervor, you can bet I’d be digging through my files for any old pages and music from cut scenes and songs, to provide an even more complete collection of his works, even if some of them never made it to an audience. I guess like us, maybe sometimes Shakespeare had to cut stuff in previews, so to speak.


March 8, 2010

Nick’s Signage Purse

I call this: On the Road Again,theatre — Posted by KP @ 10:15 pm


Nick’s signage purse deserves its own post.

During the few days that Nick was off the tour, I had the opportunity to do his job myself. One of the things I have always been dissatisfied with is how we have organized our signage. All our signs live permanently in sheet protectors and there are many different types, and they’re slippery, and carrying a bunch around, along with tape and a dry erase marker, is a huge juggling act. And carrying just a few is a pain because you can’t just make a path around the theatre, you have to keep coming back for more.

So I grabbed an expandable folder thing, which was used by our predecessors and filled with old signage, took out all the old signs, and categorized it for our signs. When we got to New York, I showed my rough creation to Nick, and we both agreed that it needed a shoulder strap, because holding the folder was only slightly less annoying than holding the loose signs. So we cut a bunch of tieline and sized it for Nick. At first he was not happy that the folder was pink, but soon embraced it.


March 5, 2010

Nap Day

I call this: On the Road Again,theatre — Posted by KP @ 7:24 pm

Just a quick day-in-the-life post.

Today we had a two-show day, in the manner that only an education-based company can: a 9:45AM matinee, and an 8PM evening show. It’s a good thing our bus is so awesome.

We were all exhausted this morning. I mean totally exhausted — cast and crew — without much explanation. I have never been so tired while calling this show. I had a Monster energy drink when I woke up at 6AM. Most of the rest of the crew had Starbucks from the hotel. And none of it helped.

During the first act, Nick and I were bemoaning how tired we were (I’m calling from backstage here). I mentioned that I hadn’t had breakfast, and maybe that was part of it. Nick earned huge bonus points by going to the bus (which was right outside the stage door) and warming up some Pop Tarts for me, and surprising me with a Mountain Dew as an extra treat. After eating I felt a little more functional, but despite now adding a Mountain Dew to my energy drink, I was still really sleepy. We all spent the whole show fantasizing about how comfortable our bunks would be as soon as the show was over.

In the final scene, after all the dead bodies have been discovered, and the Friar is explaining his tale of woe, I was really tired of standing up.

A word about my chair: I have a chair, but it’s a regular-size, kinda odd-looking folding chair that’s not tall enough to see over the calling desk, so while I sit down during the long speeches and stuff, a lot of the time I have to stand, or lean on the chair.

So during the Friar’s speech, the show is maybe 2 or 3 minutes from ending, and I’m tired, as I think I mentioned. I just wanted to rest my weary feet by kneeling/leaning on the chair, as I had done throughout the show. Well this chair is kind of unusual as folding chairs go, and clearly I kneeled on a part of it that’s not balanced to have weight put specifically on that area. The chair began to tip, dumping me over, and although I didn’t fall all the way to the floor, I couldn’t stop the chair from crashing back to the floor when I fell off it. As clattering folding chairs go, it was a fairly small noise, and as calling desks go, I was relatively far from the stage, but it was unfortunately very quiet onstage. I did not recover quickly enough to look up and see if the actors actually looked offstage to see what the noise was. God I hope not.

Storytime:
While ASM on Frankenstein I had an incident in which I was moving quickly for a cue and tripped with both feet over a prop bag which had been left in the walkway, and went crashing between tables, masking flats, and finally smacking full force into the floor during a quiet duet. I of course couldn’t see it, but I was shown many reenactments of what Hunter Foster and Christiane Noll did in response to the noise. Both of them separately left the stage after the scene and asked me more-or-less if somebody had died. Aside from ruining my pants and getting floor-burn on my knees that left a scar months after the show closed, I did make my cue.

Nick was standing right next to me when the whole thing happened, and the two of us spent the rest of the show gasping for breath from trying to stifle our laughter. He says I need to wear a spike tape “F” for “FAIL” for the evening show. I think that sounds fair.

UPDATE: Nick has dedicated a post to this event, with pictures of my “F.” It’s entitled PSM Fail.

Once the show was over, we grabbed a bite at the student cafeteria, and then all of us took a nice long nap in our bunks (between 4-5 hours for most of us, which is about as much sleep as we sometimes get overnight). In the last hour or so, we’ve all woken up and gathered in the lounge. We’re watching CSI right now. We have to go back in in about 20 minutes, and we’re all rather sad to have to leave the comfort of the bus, but we should be well-rested for load out tonight. We expect this one to be good — we have a loading dock very close to the stage, and an efficient local crew.


March 4, 2010

Tour Update: Poplar Bluff, MO and Springfield, IL

I call this: On the Road Again,theatre — Posted by KP @ 10:46 pm

We’re back on the road again, for a couple weeks in the Midwest. We have a new bus driver, Jim, and a new bus which is AWESOME. This bus is everything like the buses of legend we’ve heard about for the last two years. First of all, it has a slide, which means that when it’s parked, one wall of the front lounge moves about two feet out from the bus, doubling the amount of legroom between the couches.

Most of the time we spend on the bus when it’s moving, we’re asleep, and most of the time we’re trying to get work done or relax, we’re parked, so this has a huge impact on our comfort. We also like to all hang out together, and the large couches, combined with the slide, make it much more comfortable for all seven of us to be in the front lounge at once, without somebody getting stuck standing in the doorway. Nick and I will be doing a revised bus tour video soon.

Poplar Bluff, MO

Poplar Bluff (Three Rivers Community College) was our second stop on the tour last year. It was also our first one-nighter. This year felt a little bit different because we’re arriving later in the tour. The first couple venues are always a little bit awkward because we haven’t figured out the best way to install the set, load the truck, and set up the backstage area and dressing rooms. So it was a somewhat different experience to return, knowing exactly how things had to go.

We also got to see a little more of the town because our runner took us out to lunch at a local buffet for some Southern cooking. It was really interesting to actually be a part of the small-town atmosphere. The cool thing about Poplar Bluff is that it’s really the epitome of why we tour. There isn’t really any other professional theatre that comes through there, and the students, staff and audiences were very excited to see us. The show was not only sold out, but they were adding extra seats to accommodate all the people who came to buy tickets. At the end of the show we got our first full standing ovation ever (aside from our invited dress, which really doesn’t count).

Springfield, IL

Springfield is pretty much the opposite of Poplar Bluff — a 2,000-seat IATSE house with all the bells and whistles, in a state capital of over 100,000 people. The theatre where we’re playing, the Sangamon Auditorium, is the house where all the national tours play. In fact, about ten years ago I saw the tour of Chicago there (and ended up randomly selling merchandise at the end of the show when one of the workers got sick). I was very excited to see it on our itinerary, and being here has given me a warm fuzzy feeling that I didn’t quite expect. I mean it’s not like I haven’t stage managed in theatres where I grew up seeing shows, but I guess this one is a little more unexpected, so it feels more special.

We completed our load-in today. The crew was great. I did focus for the first time in a couple weeks, and even with only one or two electricians focusing, and having to share the Genie with carpentry, we got through all the lights very quickly.

We have two shows tomorrow (of course, a 9:45AM student show, and an 8PM evening show). We might be getting more sleep on the bus between shows than we’ll get overnight!


March 1, 2010

New York Wrap-Up

I call this: On the Road Again,theatre — Posted by KP @ 3:15 am

Tomorrow morning we hit the road again. The entire traveling company is flying together, which is a first in my time. We’re flying to St. Louis, where we will meet our buses and drive to Poplar Bluff, MO for our next show. We spent a day in Poplar Bluff last year, and it was a good day. The students and technicians there were very friendly and eager to work. And the Holiday Inn had surprisingly good internet.

For the Children

Our student matinees turned out a little strangely. First of all, despite the enjoyment of fulfilling the company’s prime mission of educating audiences, a student matinee is usually something approached with a bit of dread, only because for some of us it means getting up at 5:30. In the morning. As opposed to most performances, which require getting up at 5:30, at night. So being home, and therefore for the most part farther from the venue than we would be on the road — in many cases much farther — we stumbled in for our 10AM matinee. The crew arrived for the 8:30 show call, the cast at 9:00 for warmup or 9:15 for fight call.

We drank as much coffee as we needed, and stumbled through our pre-show rituals. I turned the house over to house management, called half hour (or had Nick do it), and went to crash in the greenroom with the rest of the crew and some of the cast. At around fifteen minutes to curtain, Corey noticed that it was awfully quiet — on this particular day the doors were all open from the greenroom to the stage. “Shouldn’t 200 kids be making more noise?”

It’s my personal responsibility to put the show on the stage at the designated curtain time, and as everything was proceeding according to plan for that, I wasn’t really concerned with whether or not the audience was coming. But when Corey and Joseph quickly returned with the news that there was no audience, the greenroom soon emptied out.

We cautiously wandered onto the stage in the empty theatre, feeling a bit like we were trespassing by being on stage so close to curtain time. One actor described it as standing in the middle of an empty Times Square. But sure enough, there was no audience! Joseph got on the phone with the office, and with our education director, Justin, who was upstairs waiting for the kids to arrive. Nobody knew where they were.

I called five, still not knowing whether we were having a show. We learned that all the students were from one school, so if they had all decided not to come, there would be no show. We began fantasizing about going home and going back to bed (we had an 8PM show that night).

At 10AM, there was still no word. This was one of the weirdest experiences of my life. Actors wandered onto the stage in full costume for the prologue, ready to be at places. We all just sort of paced about, waiting to see what would happen, and marveling at the idea of being at places and having no audience.

Now, mind you, I have had the experience before, but in the situation of Off-Off-Broadway shows that legitimately have not sold any tickets. That’s a very weird situation, too, but entirely different when you’ve got a tiny unknown show in some hole-in-the-wall theatre and are aware of the possibility that nobody has heard of you or particularly wants to see you. But this was a sold-out performance, with no indication from the ticketholders that they weren’t coming!
Finally at 10:05 we got word that the first half of the kids were a block away. With the theatre being three stories underground, we knew that would still take a while.

The cast was very patient, conserving their carefully-stored energy for 20 minutes while we waited for all the kids to arrive. They were a student audience like only NYC schools can provide, but despite their talking through the whole show and spitting gum on the marley, they were listening, by golly! I expect student audiences to be rowdy, but personally all I care about is that they’re following the show. If they’re whooping and hollering at the sex jokes, they’ve already succeeded at understanding something about Shakespeare’s writing. This particular audience really got into the fights. I think that was definitely enhanced by the intimacy at Baruch, where the swords were flying just a few feet in front of their faces. One of my favorite moments during a student show is when, after an entire act watching the characters fight with sticks and umbrellas, Mercutio and Tybalt pull apart the canes they’ve been fighting with to reveal sword blades. The two fighting swordcanes were handmade specifically for the show by a weaponsmith in Minneapolis, and are quite badass — basically a long rapier blade with a tiny piece of wood for a handle, no hand guards or anything. I figure if anyone is left in the audience who’s bored or thinks they won’t see anything that catches their interest, that moment will do it. And these particular kids were big fans of that.

Our other student matinee of the week also had problems, but they were much simpler and solved earlier in the day — we got hit with a big snowstorm the day before, and all NYC schools were closed by the mayor. We had to get up, but we had official word by 6:30 that the show was off, and after a hastily-concocted phone chain, the whole company and local crew was notified, and we could go back to bed until our evening show. It’s too bad we didn’t get to do it, because we hadn’t had a talkback with the other group either, because the show started so late. Every time we’re supposed to have a talkback they end up getting canceled.

But other than the drama with the student shows, everything went well. We loaded out after the final show last night, which we feared would take until 5AM or later because of the convoluted route from the theatre to the street, but we closed the truck at 4:00. And thankfully we had today off so we could catch up on sleep during the day. We changed out some of our lighting equipment, which has made the truck pack a little nicer.

Other Thoughts

I miss the road.

I miss seeing the show. Baruch has the worst view I have ever seen from a booth that doesn’t supplement it with video monitors. When the house is full, you can’t see the stage. End of story. Even if there was no one in the audience, you’d have a big fence railing at exactly the height of an average actor’s face when they’re standing centerstage. So one thing I have gained here is a new appreciation for being able to watch the show. I think I may call from the booth at Poplar Bluff just for that reason.

I also noticed I got more sleep doing one-nighters on tour than I got here. Part of that is the painfully long commute from Washington Heights to 24th and Lex, and the other part is that being at home is full of things to do, as opposed to being crammed on a bus, or in a hotel room with 20 channels you hate on the TV. Also, when you’ve been working for 18 hours straight, there are few things more interesting than going the hell to sleep. When you’ve been working for 10 hours and sitting on a train for 3, there’s still a bit of a desire to be active and do fun things to make up for all the work and sitting around.

I am going to miss being home, though. I haven’t had my fill of snacking, playing computer games, and having unrestricted access to a toilet and a shower. I wish we’d had a few days off here before leaving, because our show and rehearsal schedule has been so hectic. But we have a 5-day vacation in about a month, so that will be a good time to just be at home doing nothing.

Oh, look, I’m supposed to get up in an hour-and-a-half. How does this happen? I hate flying. Hate. It. So. Much.


February 27, 2010

Crew Portrait

I call this: On the Road Again,theatre — Posted by KP @ 11:47 pm

Bobby had an idea to take a crew portrait with all of us posing on the set. We need to try it again in a space with more light, but aside from being too dark, it’s a cute picture. That’s me in the window.


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